Monday, January 18, 2010

Shameless Self Promotion: "Gutted" at LACE


Hello Internet friends and followers. My work is appearing at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in a show called "Gutted" on Saturday, February 2o/2010. It's a benefit for LACE, which is an important space for weird art in LA. In his curatorial statement "Gutted" curator (and artist) Dino Dinco writes lovingly,

"As a teenager in mid-‘80s Los Angeles, Ron Athey, Luis Alfaro, and Vaginal Davis were but some of the artists who schooled me in what it meant to use the body – their bodies – to investigate a matrix of race, sex, power, community, activism, sexuality and desire through performance art. Many of the spaces where I first saw these artists are long gone: The Onyx Café, Club Fuck!, Glaxa Theater, Troy Café and countless alternative, temporary spaces in and around Downtown Los Angeles when Downtown was a vastly different landscape.

LACE isn’t only one of the few venues from that era that has survived but a vital creative force in Los Angeles, offering a space in which to present work deemed difficult or transgressive by many other established arts institutions. LACE has always occupied an awkward space – not really a gallery, not really a museum -- and perhaps it’s this awkwardness that has kept it alive, flexible to change and adapt more quickly than a larger institution. Some of my first memories of seeing live arts in Los Angeles happened at LACE on Industrial Street. I’ll never forget Nina Hagen prancing around the outside patio of LACE performing intergalactic opera or feeling the spray of warm sparks blanket my face during a Babyland set when Michael Smith applied rotary saw to oil barrel..."

If you are in or around Los Angeles please attend the show. (And if you have a mind to, report back and let me know what you thought.) In this era of general disregard for art-- let alone extreme or experimental art-- I hope you'll support a space like LACE and spread the word. Please feel free to repost:

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LACE’S ANNUAL WINTER BENEFIT Saturday 20 February 2010 I 8pm – Midnight I Doors open 7pm I $10

To purchase tickets, visit welcometolace.org
Free to all LACE members

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) is pleased to present GUTTED: LACE’S ANNUAL WINTER BENEFIT. This year, LACE has teamed up with Los Angeles-based curator Dino Dinco, who brings his own passions and experience to this annual fundraising event. Inspired by Los Angeles’ history of performance art and LACE’s role as an open platform for artistic expression, Dinco has reached out to a range of artists, both established and emerging, to present an unrestrained evening of contemporary performance. GUTTED showcases a daring ensemble of live performance, texts and objects speaking of, from and to the body. With a roster of creative talent spanning thirty years of live performance, GUTTED illustrates an array of ways artists have addressed the human form, spanning issues of domesticity and labor, AIDS, race, social activism, queerness, straightness, bodybuilding, body destruction, fantasy & grotesquerie.

Participating artists include: Benjamin Weissman, Raquel Gutierrez, Xuanito Carlos Espinoza Cuellar, Sheree Rose, Luis Alfaro, Alice Cunt, Lucas Michael, Elle Mehrmand & Micha Cardenas, Marcus Civin, Ryan Heffington, Rafael Esparza and Gronk, Brian Getnick/THE BALLET, Hi Fashion $9.99, Julie Tolentino & Pigpen, Taisha Ciara Paggett, Heather Cassils, Mariel Carranza, Dorian Wood, Samuel Vasquez, Bela Messex, Juan Martin del Campo Jr., Joseph Shahadi, and more. For a complete list, visit www.welcometolace.org.

"The impetus for GUTTED stems from my love for performance as well as my ongoing interest in the work of French philosopher and social critic Jean-Luc Nancy, particularly his work Corpus. In this work, Nancy articulates that there is no ontology of the body, but rather, the body is ontology itself. The body is a familiar subject of discourse in the arts, as we have and will always already work from the body. A body of work. A body of knowledge. Through Nancy, I view LACE – the space – as a body that will fill with bodies, where the ongoing conversation about our / their / your bodies will continue". –Dino Dinco

All proceeds benefit LACE programs.

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